


Awesome and Awful

by ckret2



Series: TFSpeedwriting Prompts [2]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-29 20:02:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16271348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: “I’m not important, I’m not special—I’m only Getaway. Nobody would ever summon me.” “Then it pleases me to be the first.” Getaway escapes death and makes a deal with the devil.





	Awesome and Awful

**Author's Note:**

> The second fic I wrote for [tfspeedwriting](http://tfspeedwriting.tumblr.com/)! I actually did this one in almost two hours like I was supposed to. Sept 8 Prompt: "Scenario - A character needs to make an impression. This can be good or bad - so long as they are ‘noticed’."
> 
>  
> 
> I don't apologize for dragging in a hint of Unicron trilogy references at the end.

Getaway had ejected his mask, and was trying to use his teeth to wrap one of the escape pod’s seat belts around his forearm like a tourniquet. He could still work his elbow, thank Pri—thank goodness; but the exposed struts under his hand dangled limply at his side, covered with black grease, drizzled with energon leaking from gnawed open fuel lines further up his arm. At least he still  _had_  this arm. It was useless, but it was  _there_. His other arm cut off, armor gnawed at all over: his right shoulder, his chest, his hips… If he hadn’t noticed how Pr—how the hand he was holding was shifting unnaturally in his grip, if he’d realized just a fraction of a second later that the mech was dissolving into scraplets…

Getaway’s arm was shaking too hard to tie the seat belt. He stopped, leaning forward, pressing his forehead against the headrest. “Okay,” he whispered. He turned his optics off. “Okay. Okay, okay, okayokayokay. You’re fine. You’re gonna make it. You made it away from Rodimus, you made it off the  _Lost Light_ , you made it through the—the swirly—space rift. You’re fine. You’re gonna be fine. You're—” He choked back a sob, and its force shook his entire body, the violence of it making him nearly double over.

When his optics were off, he saw Primus gazing steadily down at him, as He dissolved to devour Getaway alive.

“ _It’s not real!_ ” He was sobbing openly now. He could taste his neon blue tears as they rolled down his cheap gold faceplates and through the gaps in his cheeks. He shook his head, trying to spit the taste out. “It’s n— It’s n— It’s not Primus. It’s not. He doesn— He doesn’t h-hate—”

Could Getaway really say that, though? He’d failed. Cyberutopia was  _nothing_. And he’d killed, oh, god, how many people had he killed? He’d killed and lied and cheated and— and— If he couldn’t find Cyberutopia, if he couldn’t redeem himself, then how could he say that Primus didn’t hate him?

“It was  _scraplets_ ,” he told himself, harshly. “It'ssa cheap parlor trick. S'not, not a—” Another sob shook him.

And then he shoved out a furious scream.

No! He was fighting! He was escaping and starting over! New ship, new crew, new backstory, he’d reinvent himself again and he’d fight on! He wasn’t going to let a swarm of opportunistic scraplets convince him that Primus  _literally_ hated him! Primus was going to see him and  _love him_!

His optics blazed on. He wiped his face roughly against his remaining shoulder, bit down harder on the seat belt, and pulled tight.

Something beeped from behind him, over at the escape pod’s controls. Proximity warning. Something was coming toward the ship. Frag. Had to be the  _Lost Light_ , they must be following. Rodimus still wanted him dead. Well, Rodimus wasn’t going to  _get_  him. Getaway turned around to check the radar.

And stared out the front window, struck dumb.

 _That_  was Primus. Sublime and divine, magnificent and omnipotent. Great and gray and awful. The size of a planet. Getaway’s spark stopped spinning in its casing, struck with awe and terror. And He was  _reaching for him_.

No. Getaway’s fuel tank dropped out as Primus’s hand rushed toward the ship. No, He wasn’t reaching for him. He was reaching  _through_  him. His gaze was fixed somewhere far behind the escape pod. Getaway was completely immaterial.

Getaway lunged for the ship controls, but his right arm was tied up in the seat belt. He tried to stretch out for the controls, but his other arm was gone.

Primus, please, please Primus, not like this—Getaway would prefer to be eaten alive, at least then he’d be  _seen_! He should have let the scraplets eat him! Better to die thinking he was hated than to die knowing that Primus had never even noticed he existed!

The stars were blocked out as Getaway fell under the shadow of Primus’s palm. Getaway dropped to his knees. To Primus, he was debris. He was a speck of dust. Never in his life had he felt as much like the worthless Made-To-Order piece of scrap that he was—

Primus’s hand drove through the ship like a solid wall.

* * *

Getaway had never remembered the void of space feeling this cold before.

He must have been bashed into the warren. He didn’t know. Everything was a blur of pain and scrap metal after Primus smashed him aside. He lost track of how much time passed—at points, he was pretty sure, his chronometer started to move backwards. He felt dizzy, he felt sick, he felt his own life dripping out of him through countless tiny wounds.

It didn’t matter.

He was going to die—it was only a question of how long it would take—and it didn’t matter. He’d never mattered. He would wait for the end. Even the pain, the sickness, the dizziness made no difference to him. Once he was dead it would be like he’d never felt anything at all. Only a piece of debris spinning uselessly through the warren, outside linear time and space, never to be seen again. Nobody would mourn. There would be no afterlife for things like him.

He dry heaved and nothing came out.

He waited in the dark for death to finish him.

* * *

_Welcome, Getaway_.

It hurt to turn his optics on. Welcome? Who? He didn’t feel welcome. Who would welcome him anywhere? Was he dead yet? Please… please, let him be dead soon.

Everything was black. Except for someone, in the distance—Getaway couldn’t identify him from this far away. He looked tall. Ultra Magnus tall. Gold-orange, glittering with light, and crowned. He looked more like Primus than any of Getaway’s dreams of Him had, than like the scraplet impersonator had, than like even Primus Himself had. How could that be?

“P… Primus?”

His laugh battered against Getaway as though his broken armor were the surface of a drum.

_I am Unicron. You have never been further from Primus._

Getaway had drifted closer to—to Unicron. He was much taller than Getaway had expected him to be—the size of a Metrotitan, maybe? And now he saw that the crown was horns; he saw the spikes, the black armor, the dark debris wings. Dread filled his otherwise empty fuel lines and pressed heavily into his chest. Not Primus. But definitely a god. Getaway had never expected to meet a god  _without_  terror, and he couldn’t imagine ever feeling any sort of terror as profound as this. “Why are you here? Why am  _I_  here?”

 _Because I have summoned you here_.

Closer and closer. Getaway wished he knew how far away he was, he wished he knew how fast he was moving, because Unicron loomed larger and larger; and he was no Metrotitan. Unicron was armored in tectonic plates: pauldrons and gauntlets and greaves made of mountain ranges. Getaway could see white snow and green forests. A technorganic deity.

“But I'm—I’m just an MTO.” Getaway couldn’t even hear his own voice; he was speaking into the void of space. “I’m not important, I’m not special—I’m only  _Getaway_. Nobody would ever summon me.”

_Then it pleases me to be the first._

As he watched Unicron’s hand begin to move—reaching for a tiny blue planet—on some level, Getaway understood that, as huge as Unicron was, moving his hand like that meant he had to be the fastest person he’d ever seen moving in his life—something like, he couldn’t imagine, something like over a million miles an hour—but it looked so agonizingly slow. Unicron let go of what he’d been holding as his hand started to move, and—with a jolt of such sublime fear that for a moment Getaway couldn’t feel his own body—he recognized, on the rubble Unicron had left behind, the winding path of the Manganese Mountains. Cybertron. Cybertron had fit into the palm of Unicron’s hand.

And now, it was nothing. Unicron had unmade the whole planet, and with it everything that had ever mattered to Getaway.

And He was looking straight at Getaway.

With eyes the size of moons, He was looking at Getaway.

“Oh, my god.”

 _Precisely_.

There were ships, buzzing around Unicron in the distance. Every once in a while they left pinpricks of light against His armor. Were they trying to fight Him? They were as small and harmless as toothless scraplets.

“Why summon  _me_?”

 _I have need of your skills_.

“My skills?!” He laughed silently. His chest shuddered. He’d tricked a god into thinking he was worth something, and He was going to crush Getaway. At least He’d  _look_  at Getaway while He did it. “I—I don’t  _have_  any skills! I lied about  _all_  of them.”

_Exactly. You lie. You cheat. You manipulate. You betray everyone you cross paths with to get what you want, and escape when you don’t. You’re what I need._

Getaway felt his spark sink lower with each word, until he couldn’t feel it at all. So that was what a god thought of him, was it?

He was still flying toward Unicron—falling toward Unicron. Pulled by His gravity. Mountains and metal spires stretched into the hazy distance. The open cavity of His chest threatened to engulf the horizon on every side, and his entire view was slowly filled with molten gold-white light.

Unicron wanted him for his awfulness. He wanted him. A god—wanted him. As he was, now. A liar, a cheater, a manipulator. Wanted him.

 _And you’re an enemy of a Prime_.

Something reignited in his chest where his spark was supposed to be.

One of the distant buzzing ships was prickling at his comm unit. He ignored it. He didn’t have the spare energy to answer it, anyway.

“He really  _is_  a Prime, then? Not just—not just trying to be one?”

 _He’s a true Prime_ , Unicron confirmed.  _So what?_

So what?

“What do you want from me?”

 _To be an enemy of all Primes_. Something in Getaway—something still pious to his creator—nearly rebelled at the thought, but Unicron went on:  _The Primes are a petty, infighting lot. Any one Prime is exchangeable with any other. But an enemy to the Primes is unique. He will be equal not to one Prime, but to the combined might of all the Primes_.

Whatever had ignited in his chest surged brighter. “I’ll do it.”

 _Excellent_.

The sunlight in Unicron’s chest burst forth, engulfed him, and Getaway died.

Wounds healed, armor rebuilt. Indigo-blue and magenta-red paint melted together—he really had been just a wannabe Prime, just like Froid had said—into a uniform purple. Horns curled from his head like a crown. He was stronger. He was faster. He was a virus now, as insubstantial as gas—no prison would ever hold him again.

 _Behold… Sideways_.

And he knew what Unicron wanted him to do.

The distant buzzing ship was closer now, and it was still pinging at his comm. He answered it. He had the strength to, now.

“ _Are you there, Autobot? Repeat—can you read me?_ ”

Sideways knew that voice. Every Autobot to ever live knew that voice.

“Loud and clear, sir!”

“ _Oh, thank goodness—when we picked up your frequency so close to Unicron, we thought you were already gone. Hold on tight, we’re coming in to save you._ ”

“I’m not going anywhere, sir.” He crossed his arms over his chest, rubbing his hand that had been a skeleton over his arm that had been missing, and watched as the ship turned toward him. “And I’m ready to get back in the fight as soon as I can.”

“ _That’s good to hear. We need all the help we can get. What’s your name, soldier?_ ”

“Sideways. And, let me just say—” whatever Unicron had put in his chest surged with wrath; Sideways was keenly aware of how Unicron watched his every move, “—it’s an honor to meet you, Optimus sir.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Also on tumblr.](http://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/177890422552/awesome-and-awful)


End file.
